The end of Grandpa's journey

Andrew's Grandpa has been battling cancer for more than 10 years. It looks like his battle is nearing its end. Why does death have to be so hard??

Today, like a number of other days, we spent some time visiting Grandpa. But this time, I knew I had to prepare my kids a little bit for what they might see. That Grandpa might not look a lot like himself, or act like himself, but he's still Grandpa and needs to know we love him. The visit has been on our minds and hearts all day. Especially tonight, when we prayed. Tears came to my eyes as I listened to my children pray for Grandpa and Grandma, especially when Lucas slowly and thoughtfully prayed -

"Jesus, Thanks for making a special place in Heaven for Grandpa, and we hope he is happy there. And Jesus please help the doctors to help Grandpa get all better so he can be with Grandma again. And Jesus, it’s Your choice."

Journey's end

From Manitou Springs we set out on a day trip to the Royal Gorge. Ok, so it's a little tourist-trappy, but we enjoyed our day of walking across the world's highest suspension bridge, riding the steepest incline railway, and enjoying the requisite petting zoo, merry-go-round and little old-west ghost town. All right, maybe it's more than a little touristy. The real draw behind our trip here was the fact that Andrew and I whitewater-rafted the Royal Gorge 10 years ago and thought it would be cool to show the kids where we rafted and see the river from a different perspective. Seeing the rafters fly by - I had to stand there and say to our kids - see guys, isn't that so cool!!?!! Some day when you're all a bit bigger, we're going to come back here, but next time, we'll be in the raft!

On our last vacation day (I don't count driving home as vacation time), we drove up Pikes Peak. There is a reason Katherine Bates was inspired to write "America the Beautiful" from the top of this mountain. It is gorgeous. But I have to admit, although I'm not afraid of heights, the drive up was wild. At one point, it literally looked like we were driving up into the clouds.After we walked around the top for a little while (with our kids constantly insisting - "Mom, Dad, can we please go now?? It's SOOOOOO cold up here!!!") and took a bunch of pictures, we drove back down to the half-way picnic area. On the way in, we saw a cute little red fox standing in the middle of the road as if to welcome us in to the picnic grounds. Little did we know he was doing exactly that. We drove over to a picnic table, got out our food and up trotted this little fox who didn't look quite so little now that we were face to face with him. My kids (who by this time had heard plenty of ranger talks on the dangers of feeding wild animals) were very vocal with their, "Mom!! Somebody must have fed that fox! Now he knows to come get food here! How can people do that? Don't they know it's wrong?" ,etc. All of this disgust in people came to a quieting halt when the fox began inching it's way closer and the kids ran back to the safety of the van trembling with how close they had just come to nature. We are SUCH city-folk! Andrew recommended we pack up and head further into the picnic area, because, surely the fox wouldn't figure out where we are then, right? Not so much.

We had no more gotten our stuff out again, when up he trotted. At that point, Andrew commanded our scattering, chicken-hearted children to "Sit at the table and eat fast!! If we just ignore him he'll go away. EAT!" The fox wasn't buying our not-making-eye-contact bit. He inched closer (like less than 10' away), our children quietly made scared-to-death gutteral sounds and Andrew rose up to his full 6'2" hieght, grabbed a stick and prepared to fight off the beast should he decide he was done begging and just wanted that pb&j sandwich! At that moment, Lucas (I'm convinced his brain just hasn't finished making all the neural connections necessary), decided he really needed a better look at that fox. On tip-toe, he stealthily made his way nearly a foot past Andrew when he was caught! Andrew yelled out in a very commanding, I-am-so-serious kind of voice, "Get behind me!! When the fox sees me, he thinks big scary man! He sees you and thinks SNACK!!" It was all I could do to not pass my fox-coveted pb&j through my nose.